The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) is now conducting its Los Angeles County-wide homeless count every year in place of the previous every two years. The next count is set for three days in late January 2016. Of those days, the South Los Angeles count will take place on Thursday, January 28. This is one of the poorest sections of the city with a predominately Latino and Black population. The count results here are particularly important as the numbers will affect federal and state funding to combat homelessness. As a long-time resident of South LA, I am serving on LAHSA’s committee planning the January 28 count.

Last January 5,500 volunteers turned out to cover 89% of all the blocks of every street in L.A. County. They found more than 44,000 homeless people in LA County and 25,000 in the city, a 12% increase since 2013, with an 84% increase in home­less camps and people living in vehicles.

The January 28, 2016, count takes place between 8:00 pm and Midnight. Teams, usu­ally of 3, go out with Census Tract maps. One person is the driver, one the navigator with the map, and the third is the Counter. Some 6,000 volunteers are needed for the county as a whole, and about 600 for just the South Los Angeles portion. At this writing many more volunteers are needed to get enough to cover this huge territory.

Honey’s search for El Portezuelo

NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND

By Honey van Blossom

(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)

[In order to see the detail of the maps and the larger photos, you can click on them to see the full size.]

Introduction

A Huntington Digital Library cataloger wrote that the scene in the photograph of a man sitting under the boughs of a tree was taken at the Ostrich Farm in Griffith Park.
According to Mike Eberts, Griffith J. Griffith’s Ostrich Farm was located near today’s Crystal Springs picnic area.[1]